INCIDENTS AROUND THE HOUSE
Forthcoming on June 25, 2024

You know the monster in the closet? Well, it’s real. At least it is for 8 year old Bela. When we meet her in Josh Malerman’s newest offering, she is coping as best she can with the nightly visits from an entity she calls Other Mommy. At first, OM seems like her friend. She hesitates to tell Mommy and Daddo about her. But as things escalate, it becomes evident that OM isn’t going anywhere, and in fact keeps pressuring Bela to allow her to”into her heart”.

Told exclusively from Bella’s point of view, this is a fast paced read, and at times really unsettling. A child in danger always tugs at the heartstrings and makes one that much more anxious about the danger the family is in. Daddo begins to wonder who Bela is talking to and eventually things blow wide open when Mommy actually sees Other Mommy on the edge of Bela’s bed. OM doesn’t look like a normal person. She can be huge, or small. Her eyes move all about her face. And she can speak in other voices. Voices that sound like people you know.

The creep factor here is very tangible, most likely because a child is presenting it to us.
The small family itself has already been going through some serious drama, even without the otherworldly haunting making their lives even worse. Mommy and Daddo have some weighty issues to work through, and without them mending fences it will make the situation that much more grave. They eventually have a showdown with the malevolent intruder, and it will take all their collective strengths to battle both the presence and their unhinged family status.

Anyone who loves haunted house stories or family dramas will enjoy this latest from the author of Bird Box, Pearl, and several other worthy horror tales. The story being told from Bela’s POV really adds to the realistic feel and was a refreshing change from heavy-handed horror drama.
Thank you to @netgalley and @penguinrandomhouse for the ARC of this book. All opinions are my own.

The child-driven narrative reminds me of Room, and takes a quick adjustment. Sentences are short and simple, with dialogue indented in blocks with no quotes. It's easy to follow after a few pages. (if you didn't like the style of McCarthy's The Road, you might not love this)

I was often reminded of Neil Gaiman while reading, specifically Coraline and The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
The Other Mommy reminded me, of course, of Coraline's Other Mother... While Gaiman creeped us out with button eyes and mirrored family, Malerman brings his Other Mommy (and her hairy arms) out of the closet where she creeps and into the home.

I found the beginning intriguing and downright creepy. As things move along the creep and curiosity remain high, but get bogged down by repetitive scenes and rambling monologues.
The ending was really ramping up to something......and then...felt like it was over top fast, leaving me a little confused.🦇

Overall this version of the novel successfully conveys dread, tension, sadness, and heart. I flew through this one and recommend it to the thriller/horror fan!

I can definitely see it as a film.

* I received this ARC in exchange for an honest review *

I really liked Incidents Around the House. A thriller/horror told from the POV of young Bela, who is being haunted by Other Mommy, and her family who wants to save her.

You’d think because the main character is a child (maybe seven? Eight?) it would be less terrifying, but Bela’s childlike view of the world makes all the stuff in this book 10 times scarier.

I still don’t totally understand what happened at the end, but I think that’s the point, even if it hurts a little.

I think any horror fan who doesn’t mind some interesting pacing/tone will like this book.

Bela lives with her Mommy Daddo and Other Mommy. No one can see Other Mommy but Bela until one day. Other Mommy only wants one little thing from Bela. A unique haunted house story full of surprises.

This was going great for me until the end.

I thought telling the story from the POV of a child was smart. It really upped the creep factor, and the entity managed to come across as genuinely frightening and unsettling because of it. The themes of the different meanings of being haunted weren't exactly new, but they came across well and lent some weight to such a fast-paced read.

But then the ending happened, and I was left completely and entirely disappointed. It happened way too quickly and ended way too abruptly and without any resolution, as if the whole book was a prologue or a set up for a sequel.

This book, amazing!!!

It’s almost has a feel like the Exorcist, but you’re looking at it through Reagan’s eyes.

You feel like you’re in Bella’s head.
You feel her fear.
You feel her torment as her family is going through this semi-unique struggle.

Other Mommy is so so creepy and gets creepier each time we see her.

Ok…this book was so creepy. I really enjoyed the POV from 8 year old Bela. Such a different experience reading about everything happening around her from her perspective. This book will have you checking your closet and wondering if anything lurks in the dark! Thank you Random House Publishing Group and NetGalley for this arc!

Thanks to NetGalley for allowing me to read this book early.

This story is written from the perspective of a child, which honestly was very hard to follow along with. There wasn’t any quotations when characters spoke and the conversations jumped back and fourth too much. Not having the quotations made it hard to follow along with at times. I do like that it’s from the child’s perspective, I think it needed to be told that way, but it still was very hard to read because of that.

I did get scared a few times throughout the book, however, I was extremely dissatisfied with the ending. It ended so abruptly that I was turning the page wondering where the next chapter was. I could 100% see this getting turned into a movie, which I think will make it easier for people to follow along.

For some reason I also thought it was too short. I feel like not a lot happened, and I think a big part of that is cause of how it ended.

I probably wouldn’t try to read this again, it was too difficult to keep up with.

Will be posted 5/4/24 on Instagram.com/michellereadsthrillers

📖 Review: Incidents Around The House by Josh Malerman
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

This was such a fun haunting story and it actually creeped me out! Every crack/creak I heard around my house I swear something was coming to get me. 😂

👧🏼🏠👹👻

This story is from the POV of a child named Bela. Bela is haunted by an entity she calls “other mommy.” Whenever Bela is approached by other mommy she is asked “can I go into your heart?” Bela and her parents try their best to keep other mommy away but she is determined to get the answer to her question!

Pub Date: June 25, 2024

Thank you @netgalley and @randomhouse for approving my request for this ARC!

#incidentsaroundthehouse #joshmalerman
#arcreader #arcbook #booksbooksbooks #bookworm #bookstagram #booklover #horrorbooks #readmorehorror

This book was amazing!! I could not put it down! At first the way the words are in the book when the little girl Bela speaks threw me off, but it gives so much character to the story! I fell in love with the characters and couldn’t wait to finish reading to find out what happens. It is one of the scariest books I have read. The details given in the book make it easy to picture everything. I wish this was a movie! This book had me addicted with the very first chapter. If you enjoy scary books, this one is for you!

Thank you so much to NetGalley for an e-ARC of this book. I was so excited to read this because I loved Malerman's Bird Box so much. Unfortunately, Incidents Around the House fell flat for me, and I had a tough time getting through it. The story is told from the perspective of eight year old Bela. The actual book never states Bela's age, but it's states in the blurb that she is eight. At times, I felt she read as younger, like maybe, only five or so. There is a time when she mentions having a hard time reaching the potty, among other things. That doesn't seem right for an eight year old to me. I also didn't like that all of the dialogue was without quotation marks, but I thought I could overlook it if I got into the story. A lot of the hauntings got repetitive and just weren't that interesting after the first couple of times. The mom and dad characters also both were unlikable. The whole story, I was trying to figure out what was causing the haunting and how it could possibly be stopped. All of my guesses were wrong, but the actual reason was incredibly lame imo. Yes, it would be a big deal to a child living it, but to me, the reader, it was a snooze. The ending was also disatisfying and disappointing.

This was super creepy. I didn't love reading the story from the child's POV. Also, didn't love the ending.

Thank you to Netgalley & Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine | Del Rey for my ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Malerman channels the creepiness of a Goosebumps book and the sense of wrongness of Coraline to make the monster in the closet scary again. This is one of the spine-tinglingest books I’ve read since I was a kid. I never felt comfortable with it in my hands. The child narrator and use of form gave this book a unique rhythm that added to the scares — kind of like how House of Leaves uses white space, but more musical than spacial. The characters are solid and complex as they guide us through moral quandaries and explorations of the magic of being a child and how we lose that magic as we age. Just a knockout book. Highly recommend. I imagine it’ll be incredible as an audiobook.

I found myself anxiously turning each page, waiting to see what was in store for Bela. The imagery and voice were a perfect combination to keep my heart racing. I thought I was afraid of the dark before, but that feeling has been cranked up to 11!

"<I>Can I go into your heart?</I>"

note: I was provided an advance copy by NetGalley.

Maybe between 3 and 4 stars...

<B>Incidents Around the House</B> by Josh Malerman follows a young girl named Bela whose interactions with an entity she calls Other Mommy escalate when Bela routinely refuses to give her a positive answer when Other Mommy asks her persistent, increasingly intense question: "Can I got into your heart?" When the Other Mommy's presence is noticed by adults, Bela's world is turned upside down as the adults try to figure out exactly what is Bela, and how to deal with it.

This book was a mixed bag for me. I greatly dislike it when authors don't use dialogue tags, and that was no exception here--it did get a little more tolerable in scenes where only two characters were speaking, and I do think that it was intended to help the reader be placed in the mindset of a child... but once you get into larger scenes with multiple characters, back-and-forth dialogue, etc, it became frustrating to read.

There are some genuine scares here, and I think the build up to them was fantastic. Two or three scenes had me actually say, "Oh (expletive) no!" because of how almost cinema-like the scare reveal felt. In many cases, the scares here feel more like you're watching a film than reading a book with how they're set-up, and that's not a complaint. They're effective, that's for sure.

But the story gets absolutely bogged down by repetitive scenes and by the conceit of having the parents using Bela as a sounding board for their various issues, which typically results in the parents rambling on with extremely long monologues that were very tedious to read and in only one case worked out due to a reason I won't spoil.

One notably disappointing element was the ending. The story was building... absolutely building... to something. It got emotional, it got frustrating, it got heavy and dreadful. But then it delivered nothing in particular. Too quick, vague, and unsatisfying to be effective. It almost felt like the ending to a disconnected story, not the one I'd been reading. Apparently there are some interviews with the author that make things more clear, but a reader shouldn't need to seek out supplementary material to make a book work.

There are the bones of a fantastic horror novel in here, and I don't regret reading it for the few scare scenes that had me actually shocked which rarely happens when reading a book. But it has too many issues to be something I'll want to read again.

Experiencing the horrors from the perspective of a young child is so unique that I could not put this book down. Being afraid of something in your closet is such a universal experience, it is so easy to relate to Bela and feel protective of her. The writing in this books makes you want to keep reading, I had such a hard time putting this down because I so desperately wanted Bela to be safe. Even though we are following the POV of an 8 year old I still totally grasped what was happening in the adults lives around Bela, Josh Malerman was so easily able to give you just enough that you as the reader understood and almost felt bad for Bela that she was so naive to it. There were a handful of things I did not personally love in this book, the ending did not pack the same punch as the rest of the book did for me. I also DESPISED Bela's mom, I think that was the intent but I just had a hard time rooting for her to make it out. There were times I wish we got a better description of what Other Mommy looked like, there were times I didn't feel as scared because I could not envision her in my head. I also would have loved just one POV from one of the adults in Bela's life, sometimes it did get a little tiring being only in the head of an 8 year old.
Overall, this was a fun book and I think if you are a fan of Josh Malerman you will enjoy this!

The Dread!
You know those types of reads that give you goosebumps and unsettles you but you do not want to put it down? This one is like that.
The story is told from the POV of 8 y/o Bela, reading these increasingly alarming incidents following The Other Mommy from her perspective it’s for me what gives this book such a creepy feeling and makes it a perfect nightmare. It’s a must read that I know will be a favorite 🖤

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫/5

Thank you so much to @randomhouse and @netgalley for the ARC. Opinion is my own 🖤

Dread inducing and deeply disturbing, this was a read that made me scared to get back to it. Very atmospheric with a profound prose, it is safe to say that the feeling of malaise lasted long after the book was over.

Incidents Around the House is told from the POV of 8 year old Bela. Bela lives at her house with Mommy and Daddo. She also has a friend who lives with her in her room.

Other Mommy lives in Bela's closet.

At first, Other Mommy would stay in Bela's closet. After a while, she would come out of her closet and sit on Bela's bed.

Other Mommy has a question for Bela. A very, very important question.

Can I go inside your heart?

Bela doesn't want to answer Other Mommy.

Other Mommy wants Bela to say yes. But Bela won't. She either doesn't answer, or she says no.

Now, Bela sees Other Mommy around the house. She sees Other Mommy while she's in the living room talking to Daddo. She sees Other Mommy looking at her through a hole in the ceiling. She sees Other Mommy at Mommy and Daddo's party while she's dancing downstairs. That's when she realizes that other people can see Other Mommy, too.

Other Mommy wants an answer. And Other Mommy is going to do anything to get the answer she wants, no matter where Bela tries to hide.

This book TERRIFIED me. I typically read at night after my kids go to bed, and I there were several times that I had to put my kindle down before I planned to because I got too creeped out. It doesn't help that my youngest is going through an imaginary friend phase right now, but thankfully she hasn't mentioned an Other Mommy (and hopefully she never will, or I may just lose my mind).

Malerman brilliantly sets the scene. You can sense the urgency, the fear, the dread, the confusion, the panic. The way Other Mommy changes throughout the entire book is a horrifying thought, and it's incredibly well done. You never know what to expect with her, where she'll pop up. One particular scene made me shriek out loud to the point where my husband asked me if I was ok. I described what happened, and he responded with a horrified "Eeehhhh".

I'll be seeing Other Mommy in my nightmares (and hopefully not in my actual house). I feel like she'll be just in the corner of my eye for the next few months. I really hope this eventually becomes adapted into a movie. I'd love to see Other Mommy on the big screen, and I bet she would absolutely terrify audiences.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing for a copy of the ARC for my honest opinion!

This book was definitely creepy! The POV is a child, so that was different the story comes out in spurts like a child’s thoughts. I really can’t decide if I liked it or not. But, it was unique. I did enjoy the creep factor and it definitely felt like watching a scary movie. If you like books about haunting and can handle the young POV I think you’ll like this one! I’m still not sure how I feel about it. I didn’t dislike it but I also didn’t love it either! But I am glad I read it!

Thank you @netgalley and @Delreybooks for letting me read this one early!